Half Of What You See
by A Bullfrog's Worst Nightmare
Summary: The day she truly died, was the day she stopped believing.


**A/N: Written for the second round of the Speed of Lightning challenge. Prompt was the genre 'angst'. Hope you enjoy!**

_Half Of What You See_**  
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She never told her children the exact reason why she wore radish earrings or a necklace of butterbeer caps. The twin boys never wondered about it, until they went to King's Cross station for the first time at the beginning of their first year at Hogwarts and noticed the other mothers didn't wear jewelry like that.

"Why don't they look like you, mommy?" Lysander, the oldest of the pair asked.

"Because I'm not them," she would respond in her dreamy voice.

She waved to her two boys as the train slowly started to pull away from the station, completely ignoring the stares she was receiving from the other parents. She ignored the whispers about the strange Scamander widow.

Lysander and his brother Lorcan never used to wonder where their father was. They were never around other children when they were younger and just assumed it was normal to have no father. She never told them what happened to him when they asked. She never told them anything.

It wasn't long before they became embarrassed by their mother's presence. Especially when she arrived to pick up her sons at the beginning of the summer from the train station and decided to wear brightly colored, oversized glasses and a skirt so long it dragged far behind her. They asked her why she dressed the way she did and she replied with a simple "I'm unique".

There was a time when she used to paint.

Along every wall of their house there was an abstract picture of some sort of creature with labels scrawled underneath. Nargles. Wrackspurts. Crumpled-horned Snorack. She painted them before the twins were born and never explained the meanings behind them.

Now she just sits by the window and reads, sunlight streaming in through the glass and illuminating her pale features. She may not say much, but she was still the most beautiful mother, according to the twins.

They lived in a peaceful household, where the three people living in it hardly ever fought. It was just the occasional bickering between Lysander and Lorcan, which their mother quickly put a stop to every time. They didn't have much and any income they received came from their mother's research papers about various magical creatures she would publish from time to time.

She wasn't a strict mother and had very few rules. Be kind and don't always believe what you hear and only believe in some of the things that you see. Both rules she emphasized strongly, yet she was never angry if they were broken.

The twins always lived by their mother's rules, even after she was gone. They never sold the house and kept all her strange collection of items. It was the same house that she grew up in.

The cause of her passing remained unknown and a surprise to everyone but her own sons. The boys used to think that their mother was slowly dying a little each year that they knew her. They gave her a happy funeral, one with all her favorite vibrant colors and her favorite music that she told them she used to dance to. It was a wish she had and often talked about it.

Lysander and Lorcan stood off to the side, listening to everyone pay their respect. Hearing about how wonderful she was, how happy she always seemed. Creative, unique, beautiful were also words people used to describe her, though the boys never actually heard these people say those exact words when she was alive.

"It was so sudden!" Another common phrase that was used that day. A sentence couldn't have been more false than that.

She laid in her casket in a plain light blue dress with matching small blue flowers braided into her dirty blond hair. Her pale, thin hands rested on her stomach and her face was marked with countless wrinkles. It almost looked like she was sleeping. Almost.

If you asked the twins, they would tell you she died a long time ago. They would tell you she died just before they were born. She was never the lively woman they had seen in pictures or the brave girl they heard stories about. The person they called mother was a woman who lost her ability to look at the world with a pair of innocent and curious eyes. The sheer amount of tragedy she'd seen began to catch up with her and blinded her imagination.

It was painful for the boys to live with a mother who had handled more deaths of loved ones than any other person could be capable of. It was the day when she could no longer comfort herself with her own fantasies.

The day Luna Lovegood truly died was the day she stopped believing.


End file.
